Playing it again on my PC is an entirely different story. Playing the beta, on a mid-range PC, is extraordinary.

If you’re planning to buy Titanfall, and have a choice whether to play on PC or Xbox - don’t hesitate. Buy it on the PC. Here’s why.

The mouse and keyboard advantage

Halo and Call of Duty might have found a home on the consoles, but they’re games that throw players into tight confined corridors with short-range weapons, or rely on an awful lot of auto-aim. In open spaces, console controllers rarely feel precise enough to deliver accurate shots when players drift from right to left.

Titanfall doesn’t just have players drifting right and left. They’re bouncing up and down, using jetpacks, and running sideways up walls. I found, playing on Xbox that the controller really struggles to keep up with Titanfall’s action. This is an overly complicated way to say that I am absolutely useless at playing Titanfall with a joypad.

On PC, with the mouse and keyboard, it just feels like a better, more precise game. You can pick and choose your shots without relying on the auto-aim. You can bring down snipers and roof campers from afar, and you’re able to rapidly swing your Titan’s frame around when approached from behind.

The mouse and keyboard, too, helps with Titanfall’s excellent parkour skills. As you wallrun, you’re able to pick where you’re about to jump to ahead of time, choosing where to land your feet for the next jump. On PC, you’ll feel more mobile, more able, not just to reach the game’s highest points, but to move between them more fluidy.

It looks a little bit better

Don’t expect a version with more effects, or bells and whistles - there’s not much difference between the raw textures on Xbox and PC. But the Xbox One version of the game is running at a lower resolution: 1408x792.

How good Titanfall looks is obviously dependent on your PC - but I’ve found that even my aging PC - (i5,8 gigabytes RAM, Radeon 6900 series GPU) isn’t really stretched by the game. With all details set to high, the game runs at a near constant 60 frames per second, at 1920x1080, with 2xAA.

It’s not just pretty pixels. The addition of a slightly wider field of view via a slider, to 90 degrees over the standard 70 makes the battle a little easier to follow - you’re aware of a little bit more about what’s going on to your right and left.

Origin isn’t terrible

The real worry I had about Titanfall going into beta was Origin: EA’s online launcher and matchmaking service. The reality is that the matchmaking hasn’t suffered a single hiccup since the beta launched on PC, and the servers have been steadily available. There’s been no downtime, and I haven’t suffered from lag, crashes, or disconnections. The only slight snag I’ve come across is a friend’s online status not updating when he came online - and that was easily fixed.

Better community features

Here’s where I think the Xbox version really suffers: the Xbox One, some six months following launch, still hasn’t been updated to support streaming to Twitch. That support is built directly into Origin. If you want to stream and share what’s going on in-game, the PC is the only choice. That suggests, too, that if Titanfall is to find any competitive footing, that community will form faster on PC.

Some other quick observations

Titanfall is not a dick about alt-tabbing. There’s no fullscreen windowed mode, but it doesn’t throw a heart-attack if you quickly alt-tab out between matches to check twitter.

It’s cheaper on PC, particularly if you shop around. If you buy the boxed retail version, you’ll be able to find it at a considerable discount than if you bought it directly from Origin. That boxed retail version will register on Origin, and you’ll be able to chuck away the disc and box once it’s installed.

Respawn are saying that there will be no mod support for Titanfall at launch. Personally, I don’t think they’ll want anyone to mess about with their delicately balanced multiplayer game, and that will include graphical tweaks. However, I do wonder if they’ll open up a less restrictive server browser/host later on down the line.

According to benchmarks a $150 GPU is able to play this game better than the Xbox One. That's incredibly sad and I cannot believe how underpowered the next gen consoles (particularly the Xbox) are. It wasn't this bad when the last gen consoles launched they were a lot closer to PC than the current boxes are.

"The real worry I had about Titanfall going into beta was Origin: EA’s online launcher and matchmaking service. The reality is that the matchmaking hasn’t suffered a single hiccup since the beta launched on PC, and the servers have been steadily available. There’s been no downtime, and I haven’t suffered from lag, crashes, or disconnections. The only slight snag I’ve come across is a friend’s online status not updating when he came online - and that was easily fixed. "

Not to make too fine a point of it, but a lot, a LOT of people were saying the same thing before Battlefield 4 launched.

"Origin isn't terrible" just ruined this article's credibility in its entirety. The program is disgusting unless you're in the US or the UK, and has a bunch of random and unexplainable bugs that people can't fix because EA support is run by monkeys. I still have pastebins about them telling me to restart my PS3 to fix problems with Battlefield 3 on my PC.

Titanfall is a decent and in times fun game which, I’m sure, will be successful due to easy entry level, nice graphics and interesting mechanics. However for my taste it way too Call of Duty like, which I played way to much, so I don’t feel like I’m playing new game, more like expansion or mod for CoD. Absence of any meaningful gun handling instead of mindless point and left mouse button hold doesn’t help either.

E.g. game lacks that something which will discern it from numerous other arcade shooters or at least deepen the experience. Some type of economy system or interesting feature beyond the boundaries of core gameplay (something like Hearthstone did with its Arena) would be nice, but not going to happen.

Thus I see this game as a short-lived affair like any modern CoD iterations, especially considering that it’s EA we're talking about here.

"Respawn are saying that there will be no mod support for Titanfall at launch. Personally, I don’t think they’ll want anyone to mess about with their delicately balanced multiplayer game" AKA They don't want it to affect their DLC sales.